I guess that the government was trying to intimidate us. Vietnam veterans were not the kind of guys you could easily intimidate.
Scott Camil: 50 years later.
They were soldiers once. Yes, and young.
Scott Camil, Peter Mahoney, Stanley Michelsen, Don Perdue, Alton Foss, John Kniffen, William Patterson.
Collectively they served a total of 111 months in-country ‘nam. Between them they earned 57 medals and citations.
Gutting it out in the heat and the jungle. Through all of the mud and the blood.
Then they returned home, tossed their medals and threw themselves into a campaign to stop a bloody war built on lies.
For which sin their government tried to imprison them for the remainder of their young years.
Along with non-veteran John Briggs, the so-called Gainesville 8 defendants went on trial in the GNV federal courthouse in 1973. On trumped up charges of conspiring to disrupt the 1972 Republican National Convention.
It was a circus of a trial, with Justice Department prosecutors – for lack of any real evidence – trotting out informers, inferences and half-backed conspiracy theories to make their case.
But a GNV jury did not buy what Richard Nixon‘s Justice Department was so clumsily trying to force feed them.
Larry Turner, a young, UF-trained lawyer from Marianna, was a junior member of the defense team. He recalled a lunch break, late in the trial, in which two Black jurors happened to pass G8 lawyers walking in the opposite direction on the other side of University Avenue.
The two jurors raised clenched fists in solidarity.
“I knew then that we got this,” Turner recalled.
It took a jury just four hours to exonerate.
Followed by a hug fest between defendants and jurors (while prosecutors ducked out a side door to avoid reporters).
“We came home from Vietnam,” Scott Camil would later say, “and saw that the government was not telling the truth about the war.
We exercised the Constitutional rights that we fought to protect and tried to educate the public to the truth.
The government came after us with a vengeance, trampling on our rights in an effort to silence and intimidate us.
We stood up to the government and prevailed.”
What difference a half century makes?
This weekend, the five surviving G8 defendants – Camil, Mahoney, Michelsen, Perdue and Briggs – reunited at Camil’s home for a 50 year celebration of their GNV exoneration.
It was a time for fellowship. A time to renew old acquaintances.
And a time to remember their fellow defendants who have passed: Alton Foss, John Kniffen and William Patterson.
Then those survivors caravanned downtown to pose for a group photo in front of the federal courthouse. Just as they had done so many, many years ago.
Older, certainly. Wiser, perhaps.
But resolved still that, at the critical hour, they had stood by their convictions…even on pain of imprisonment.
And at the federal courthouse – where they had last gathered to learn that a GNV jury had set them free – they found GNV Mayor Harvey Ward bearing a proclamation to…well, yes…thank them for their service in the cause of peacemaking.
“We are glad you are here,” Ward told them.
“The Gainesville Eight occupy an important and special place in the history of our community and our nation,” the proclamation stated.
Freed of the threat of imprisonment, these defendants went on to become salesmen, emergency response workers, jacks of all trades and entrepreneurs. They became husbands and fathers. They divorced and remarried. They lived in the suburbs and, by nearly all such measures, bought into the American Dream.
They grew older, certainly. Wiser perhaps.
But to this day they have not outlived their skepticism of a government that sent them to a far off land to fight and kill and bleed….ultimately for all of the wrong reasons.
Because they had once been soldiers. And young.
FreeGNV 